Queer 2024 Daniel Craig Movie Review

 

Queer 2024 Starring Daniel "Bond, James Bond" Craig
Beat ideas literally killed people

The 2024 film Queer is inspired by a novella by Beat Movement co-founder William S. Burroughs. Burroughs wrote Queer in 1952, but it was not published till 1985. Queer is directed by award-winning, 53-year-old Italian director Luca Guadagnino. Guadagnino has won praise for his films Call Me By Your Name, Bones and All, and Challengers. Between 2006 and 2021, star Daniel Craig played James Bond. After retiring as Bond, Craig took on the role of detective Benoit Blanc in the "Knives Out" franchise. Co-star Drew Starkey is a newcomer. He has made an impression playing a troubled teen on the Netflix drama Outer Banks.

Queer's thin plot: an American, William Lee (Daniel Craig) is pursuing a life of casual hook-ups and drug use in Mexico in the 1950s. There, Lee encounters the much younger Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a former sailor. Craig is 56; Starkey is 31. Starkey appears to be in his early twenties in Queer. Lee lusts after Allerton, but Allerton keeps his emotional and physical distance from Lee, even while they are having sex.

Many read the film as a treatment of unrequited love. Wikipedia classifies Queer as a "period romantic drama." For director Luca Guadagnino, Queer is "about connection. When you meet someone with whom you  know you have a connection, no matter what complications arise, no matter what the cultural or emotional interruptions … the strength of it is eternal." Guadagnino says Queer is "a story of unsynchronized love." Daniel Craig insists that "Allerton is as in love with Lee as Lee is in love with Allerton … Allerton just can't show it." Queer, Craig says "deals with many universal themes about love, desire, loneliness and the need to connect."

Queer the book is based on Burroughs' own life. Eugene Allerton is based on a real former serviceman, Adelbert Lewis Marker, who was fifteen years younger than Burroughs. Professor and author Tim Gilmore writes, "Reading the novel alongside Burroughs’ letters and diaries shows that he made up almost nothing in Queer except for names." Marker died in 1998, leaving behind a wife and two sons.

Wicked 2024 Movie Review: Overrated Didn't like Wicked

 

Wicked 2024
Wicked is very popular but it hasn't enchanted everyone

 

She's twenty-four years old and she weighs a hundred pounds. She's pretty but conventionally so. Plainly human, like the rest of us, she will eventually wither and die. But right now she's twenty-four and a bare-backed gown of hip-hugging satin and ostrich feathers billows about her.

 

She resists his seduction. He sings to her – "Cheek to Cheek." They dance beside a pool of water. He is charming and she is charmed. The music, and the scene, begin as conventional patter and rise to passionate intensity. Her dance expresses that which elevates the human above the animal; her movements defy that which reduces mortals to dirt. She, freed of human limitation, wafts like the wind; she flows like water. She has joined the eternal elements; she is black and white, the elemental colors of clouds and constellations.

 

Near the conclusion, though, three times, he lifts her, spins her, and she spreads her legs. He then dips her almost to a full recline, almost to the ground, and her body goes limp. The feathers cover her face modestly like a fan – her hidden expression no doubt communicates feelings too intimate to share. The music quiets. He, a satisfied smile on his face, tenderly guides her to a stone wall, where she leans back, open-mouthed. We recognize that this old movie is telling us, in old movie language, that she has just had that precious human experience that one can have only in a human body, a climax.

 

Audiences who went to see the 1935 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film Top Hat might have, earlier that same day, been on a bread line. That year my parents were foraging for food in the forest. That feather dress transported audiences away from the Great Depression and into pure beauty.

 

Ninety years later, when I am crushed by the burdens of this world, I sometimes rewatch that dance. Its escape from, return to, and celebration of the human condition gives me what I need to go on.

 

Music analyst Robert Kapilow salutes the scene's "meticulous craft." "Cheek to Cheek" sounds familiar, simple, even corny. But it demonstrates the talent that Irving Berlin exercised in writing 1,500 songs in a sixty-year career. Berlin also wrote "God Bless America;" his "White Christmas" is said to be the best-selling single of all time. One-hundred-thirty-six years after Berlin's birth, during the month of December, one can hear "White Christmas" on any radio station or in any shopping mall.

 

"Cheek to Cheek" is "mock-mundane." Any amateur might hear the song and think, "Hey, I could have written that." Berlin's sophistication is disguised. "Every note in the vocal line" Kapilow points out, is on the beat, but with the lyrics, "When we're out together dancing cheek to cheek," "Every single note is off the beat … it's so subtle, you almost don't even notice it." Kapilow says that Berlin "brilliantly elides the" song's sudden, intense passion "in a minor key" and resolves that operatic intensity by concluding with a return to the casual flirtatiousness of the song's opening. "These are not just tunes … These songs are three-act dramas in two minutes."